The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius

The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius

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The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius, by Dino Franco Felluga. SUNY, January 2005. $65

Dino Felluga works up a complex mixture of theory and history to explore the writing and reception of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, far and away the two most popular poets of the Romantic period. The Perversity of Poetry examines how both poets employed the genre of romance to opposite political ends, but the bulk of its energy is devoted to analyzing their reception history from the time they published to the mid-igth century. The book makes the argument that the marginalization of poetry allowed critics to portray the genre as either an illness (both for the poet and for society at large) or a panacea.

Felluga brings an array of sophisticated theoretical tools drawn from Marxist and psychoanalytic traditions to bear on the discourse surrounding Byron and Scott. These he employs lucidly and, by and large, convincingly to tease out the social and psychological structures at play and the cultural and political work done around the poetry. Occasionally the weight of so much theory threatens to mystify what it seeks to illuminate, as when Byron's "spirit of liberty" becomes in Felluga's hands a "hauntology of the self. …